Shouldn't it be accessible to emergency personnel located closer to the "exterior" of a (smashed) car ? (Notice how in some accidents the occupants need to be "cut out" ... how do you get in there and pull the switch ?) Wouldn't a better location be under the hood or trunk -- which, if heavily damaged, is often "popped up" ? Is this "disconnect" the same as or related to the SRS disable that emergency personnel needs to get to ?

I wondered about some sort of mechanical cable system to a couple different places to pull the disconnect. So if one part of the vehicle was damaged or inaccessible after an accident you could access a cable pull from another place.

garygid wrote:At the front, the two big red connectors would be the battery pack's Plus and Minus, which would be about 350 volts DC, designed to carry something like 250 amps (85 kW capable).

Since the front seats are positioned on top of the front battery modules, those two big red connectors appear to be in a fairly inaccessible location underneath the shifter "mouse" in the center console. My guess is that they are the prime connection between the battery pack and the controller/chargers...?

This bring up another question. Take the recent media hype about runaway Toyota vehicles with their gas pedal issues or whatever. Well, first of all, I thought that was mostly retarded because anyone who doesn't know about putting a car into neutral or turning it off doesn't need to be behind the wheel of a car.

However - this is something we should seriously think about with the Leaf. As far as I know, it has no transmission to put into neutral, right? I've also always been told that with do-it-yourself electric cars there is always a small change the motor controller could fail, and fail in a way that was supplying constant power to the motor without being able to shut it off. Although the battery pack is generally connected via a relay which is controlled by the key-switch, there is a possibility that if the current is high enough the relay may not be able to disconnect.

So Nissan needs to be sure to provide us with the means, and the education to be able to stop the Leaf in the event of a stuck throttle or motor controller.

adric22 wrote:This bring up another question. Take the recent media hype about runaway Toyota vehicles with their gas pedal issues or whatever. Well, first of all, I thought that was mostly retarded because anyone who doesn't know about putting a car into neutral or turning it off doesn't need to be behind the wheel of a car.

However - this is something we should seriously think about with the Leaf. As far as I know, it has no transmission to put into neutral, right? I've also always been told that with do-it-yourself electric cars there is always a small change the motor controller could fail, and fail in a way that was supplying constant power to the motor without being able to shut it off. Although the battery pack is generally connected via a relay which is controlled by the key-switch, there is a possibility that if the current is high enough the relay may not be able to disconnect.

So Nissan needs to be sure to provide us with the means, and the education to be able to stop the Leaf in the event of a stuck throttle or motor controller.

Yeah... and it should be a mechanical hard disconnect, not some stupid thing through a touch screen interface on a computer connected to a bunch of sensors and actuators with hundreds of points of failure.